How do you check if your brand appears in ChatGPT?
Open ChatGPT and ask ten questions a real buyer would ask before choosing a supplier in your category — not questions containing your brand name. Record whether you're mentioned, whether you're linked, and who gets named instead. Repeat in Perplexity and Google AI Mode. It takes about twenty minutes and gives you a more useful baseline than most paid dashboards, because you choose the questions.
Most businesses have never done this. One 2026 survey of marketing and SEO practitioners found that while the large majority of brands appear somewhere in AI-generated results, only around 14% were tracking AI citation visibility at all.
Why your Google rankings don't tell you
This is the finding that surprises people, and it's been replicated across several independent datasets.
Ahrefs analysed 15,000 prompts and found roughly 12% of the URLs cited by AI assistants rank in Google's top 10. Per engine the divergence is sharper: Perplexity tracks Google reasonably closely at around 29%, while ChatGPT sits in the 6–8% range. Semrush reached the same conclusion from the other direction, finding that pages ChatGPT cites sit at organic position 21 or lower the overwhelming majority of the time.
There's one important exception. Google's AI Overviews are built on Google's own results, so they overlap far more — though that overlap has been falling, from roughly 76% of citations coming from top-10 pages in mid-2025 to around 38% by early 2026 in Ahrefs' data.
The practical consequence: you can rank first for your main term and be entirely absent from the AI answer that a buyer sees before they ever reach a search results page. Ranking is not a proxy. You have to look.
The twenty-minute audit
Step 1 — Write ten real buying questions. Not "what is TapasSEO." Questions a buyer asks before they know who you are: *what's the best X for a small business*, *how much should I pay for Y*, *what's the difference between A and B*, *who are the leading providers of Z*.
The temptation is to pick questions you'd win. Resist it — a flattering question set produces a flattering answer and no information.
Step 2 — Run them in a clean session. Logged out, or in a temporary chat with memory off. Personalisation and chat history will contaminate the result otherwise.
Step 3 — Record three things per question:
- Were you mentioned by name?
- Were you cited with a clickable link? These are different, and the gap matters.
- Who was named instead, and which sources did the answer draw on?
Step 4 — Repeat in Perplexity and Google AI Mode. Do not skip this. Analysis of 680 million citations found only about 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT are also cited by Perplexity, and one study found the two engines plus Gemini share zero cited domains on 35–40% of queries. Checking one engine tells you about one engine.
Step 5 — Save it. Date it and keep the file. Without a baseline, six months of work is unprovable.
Reading the result
| What you found | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Absent everywhere, competitors present | Entity or third-party signal problem, usually not a content problem | Diagnose before writing more content |
| Mentioned but never linked | You're known but not treated as a source | Structural and content work — see #21 |
| Present in one engine, absent in others | Normal. Engines diverge sharply. | Decide which engines your buyers use |
| Present, but the answer is wrong about you | The engine is drawing on stale or inaccurate third-party sources | Find and fix the sources |
| Nobody in your category is named | Emerging category, or the question is too generic | Rewrite the questions |
The fourth row deserves attention. An AI answer confidently misdescribing your pricing, your services or your ownership is worse than absence, and it's fixable — but only if you know it's happening.
The most common cause of total absence
Before anything else, check whether AI crawlers can reach your site.
One analysis of AI citation data reported that a large majority of sites carry technical barriers blocking AI crawler access. Most of it is accidental — a CDN default, an over-broad robots.txt rule, or a bot-protection setting nobody revisited.
The agents to allow, if you want to be cited:
- GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot — OpenAI
- ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot — Anthropic
- PerplexityBot — Perplexity
- Google-Extended — Google's Gemini grounding
Blocking these has no effect on your Google rankings — Googlebot is a separate crawler with separate rules. Check robots.txt, then check your CDN's bot rules separately, because the two frequently disagree.
What "AI SEO services" should actually cover
If you're buying help rather than doing this yourself, an engagement should include measurement across multiple engines, crawler access remediation, content restructuring for passage extraction, entity signal alignment, and third-party presence work. What GEO services include breaks that down.
The thing to check: whether you're buying work or a dashboard. Monitoring tells you the score. It doesn't change it.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if ChatGPT mentions my brand? Ask it ten questions a buyer would ask before choosing a supplier — without naming your brand — in a logged-out or memory-off session, and record whether you're mentioned, whether you're linked, and who's named instead.
Does ranking on Google mean I'll appear in AI answers? Largely no. Ahrefs found only about 12% of URLs cited by AI assistants rank in Google's top 10, and for ChatGPT specifically the overlap is in the 6–8% range. Google's own AI Overviews are the exception, though even that overlap has fallen sharply.
Why does my brand appear in Perplexity but not ChatGPT? Because the engines use different source pools. Analysis of 680 million citations found only about 11% of domains are cited by both, and on a substantial share of queries the two share no cited domains at all.
What stops AI engines citing my site? Most often, crawler access. A large share of sites block AI crawlers accidentally through CDN defaults or over-broad robots.txt rules. Blocking them has no effect on Google rankings, so it frequently goes unnoticed.
How often should I check AI visibility? Quarterly is a reasonable floor. Citation patterns have been documented shifting substantially within weeks after platform changes, so anything less frequent than quarterly risks acting on stale information.
Is being mentioned the same as being cited? No, and the distinction matters commercially. A mention builds awareness; a citation includes a link a user can follow. Engines differ considerably in how readily they link.
Check now, then decide
The AI Visibility Checker runs a query of your choosing across multiple engines and shows whether you're mentioned, cited, or absent. Free, no email.
If you're absent and want to know *why* — which sources engines use instead of you, and what's keeping you out — the GEO/AEO Discovery Audit is the diagnosis rather than the score.